About AAK
AAK specializes in plant-based oils that are the value-adding ingredients in many consumer products, making them better tasting, healthier, and more sustainable. Through its unique co-development approach, the company is working in close collaboration with customers and partners, continuously enabling them to be successful in a better way. With its headquarters in Malmö, Sweden, AAK has been Making Better Happen™ for 150 years.
Problem
AAK has recently announced its commitment to a verified deforestation-free and conversion-free palm oil supply chain by 2025. To deliver on these sustainability commitments, AAK sought a third party that could provide important data via satellite monitoring, covering 100% of the palm oil mills in the company’s supply base.
This is a major step forward and allows AAK to fast-track implementation of the verified deforestation-free (VDF) target on a global level, positioning AAK as a leader in sustainable palm oil sourcing.
Solution
AAK partnered with Satelligence to leverage our real-time high-resolution satellite data in order to meet the company’s criteria. Working in tandem, we help them monitor their global supply base for palm oil in order to detect signs of deforestation.
Our monitoring technology allows for alerts to be created in response to deforestation events in plantations, protected areas, peatland, and any other area that has been identified as sensitive, in and around AAK’s supplier operations. These events are logged as incidences that the team at AAK can investigate with the relevant supply chain partners to determine whether or not they are linked to supplier operations.
Results
Since implementing our satellite monitoring services, AAK has been able to incorporate the findings into ongoing supplier engagement. AAK’s approach to possible NDPE (No Deforestation, No Peat, and No Exploitation) violations is to engage, investigate, and demand appropriate remediation where necessary. This approach, rather than immediate suspension, helps drive continuous improvement throughout the supply chain, reinforces market commitments to NDPE policies, and prevents the development of a two-tiered market of sustainable and unsustainable palm oil. The real-time alerts have also provided important data to allow AAK to more confidently and accurately determine VDF volumes, one of the company’s key sustainability commitments.
As AAK investigates each of the generated alerts within its supply chain, the company’s feedback on which are supply chain-linked deforestation incidences and which are not contribute to the refinement of Satelligence’s datasets. This, in turn, allow our alerts to become more focused and accurate, creating a win-win situation for both companies.
